5 That Foreign Brain Trust

There had not been a single foreign adviser with China's Red Army during the first five years of its existence. Not until 1933 did Li Teh appear in the Kiangsi soviet districts as a German representative of the Comintern, to take a high position both politically and militarily. Yet despite the numerical insignificance of this "foreign influence, "several responsible Communists in the Northwest apparently felt that Li Teh's advice had been to a great extent responsible for two costly mistakes in the Kiangsi Red republic. The first, as Mao Tse-tung pointed out, was the failure of the Red Army to unite with the Nineteenth Route Army, when the latter arose in revolt against Nanking in the autumn of 1933.

The Nineteenth Route Army, commanded by Generals Chen Ming-hsiu, Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai, and Chiang Kuang-nai, had made an impressive defense of Shanghai against the Japanese attack in 1932, and had demonstrated its strong national-revolutionary character. Transferred to Fukien after the Shanghai Truce, it gradually became a center of political opposition to Nanking's "nonresistance"policy. Following Nanking's negotiation of the humiliating Tangku Truce with Japan, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders set up an independent government in Fukien province and started a movement for a democratic republic and the destruction of Chiang Kai-shek's regime.

The Nineteenth Route Army was one of the few Kuomintang military units never defeated by the Reds, and they had great respect for its fighting ability. Composed mostly of Cantonese, it really reflected in its political character a loosely organized left-wing opposition movement. It was the main military support of several factions on the periphery of the Kuomintang, led by the She-hui Min-chu T'ang, the Chinese Social Democrats.

Sent to Fukien to participate in Communist suppression late in 1932, the Nineteenth Route Army leaders instead quickly built up a base of their own from which to oppose Chiang Kai-shek. They entered into a nonaggression agreement with the Reds and proposed an anti-Nanking, anti-Japanese alliance along much the same lines that were later on evolved in the Northwest between the Manchurian, the Northwestern, and the Communist armies. But instead of cooperating with the Nineteenth Route Army the Reds withdrew their main forces from the Fukien border to western Kiangsi. That left Chiang Kai-shek free to descend from Chekiang into neighboring Fukien with little impediment. The Generalissimo struck before the Nineteenth Route Army was prepared militarily or politically, and quickly quashed the insurgents. The Reds consequently lost their strongest potential allies. There is no doubt that elimination of the Nineteenth Route Army very much facilitated the task of destroying the southern soviets, to which Chiang Kai-shek at once turned with a new confidence early in 1934.

The Reds' second serious mistake was made in the planning of strategy and tactics to meet Chiang's new offensive——the Fifth Campaign. In previous campaigns the Reds had relied on superiority in maneuvering warfare, and their ability to take the initiative from Chiang Kai-shek in strong swift concentrations and surprise attacks. Positional warfare and regular fighting had always played minor roles in their operations. But in the Fifth Campaign, according to Red commanders to whom I talked, Li Teh insisted upon a strategy of positional warfare, relegating partisan and guerrilla tactics to auxiliary tasks, and somehow won acceptance for his scheme against (so I was told) "unanimous"opposition of the Red military council.^[1]

But whatever errors of judgment Li Teh may have made, there was little question that his long experience with Chinese fighting methods, and on Chinese terrain, made him one of the best qualified Occidental military authorities on China. And the personal courage of a man who had endured the severe hardships of the Long March commanded admiration and remained a challenge to armchair revolutionaries all over the world. For Li Teh, an outsize foreigner, the Long March had presented some special hardships. He had stomach complaints, and was badly in need of a dentist, but his first problem was to keep supplied with shoes large enough for his enormous number elevens. There did not seem to be any shoes that big in China. For three years he had lived without any contact with Europeans, most of the time without books to read. When I was in Pao An he was delighted to have got hold of a copy of the huge China Year Book, which he carefully digested from cover to cover, including its innumerable tables of statistics——a feat constituting one of the few things he could boast in common with the Year Book editor, H. G. W. Woodhead, C.B.E. This blue-eyed, fair-haired Aryan had not spoken a word of Chinese when he first immersed himself alone with his Oriental comrades, and he still had to conduct all his serious conversations through interpreters or in German, Russian, or French.

It was almost impossible to believe that under any genius of command the Reds could have emerged victorious against the odds that faced them throughout the year of the Fifth Campaign. It was not the phenomenon of foreign support on the side of the Reds, but its presence in a major degree on the side of the Kuomingtang, that characterized the last struggle of the Kiangsi Soviet Republic. Quite clearly the Chinese Red Army was not "officered by Russian Bolsheviks, ""mercenaries of Moscow rubles, "or "puppet troops of Stalin."Chinese and foreign newspapers during the anti-Red wars used regularly to report how many "corpses of Russian officers"were found on the battlefield after a Kuomintang atttack on the Reds. No foreign corpses were ever produced, yet so effective was this propaganda that many non-Communist Chinese really thought of the Red Army as some kind of foreign invasion.

So much for Kiangsi. During the next two years of the Long March the Reds were almost entirely cut off from contact even with their own Party members in the coastal cities of China, and the Comintern only infrequently got into direct communication with the Red Army. Wang Ming (Ch'en Shao-yu), ^[*] the Chinese Party's chief delegate in Moscow, must have found it very difficult at times to get accurate information even on the location of the main forces of the Red Army for his reports to the Comintern, and some of his articles in lnprecorr^[**] seemed to reflect that. I happened to be in Pao An one day when some copies of Inprecorr arrived, and I saw Lo Fu, the American-educated secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, eagerly devouring them. He mentioned casually that he had not seen an Inprecorr for nearly three years.

And not until September, 1936, while I was still with the Reds, did the detailed account of the proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held just a year previously, finally reach the Red capital of China. It was these reports which brought to the Chinese Communists for the first time the fully developed thesis of the international anti-Fascist united-front tactics which were to guide them in their policy during the months ahead, when revolt was to spread throughout the Northwest, and to shake the entire Orient. And once more the Comintern and Stalin were to assert their will in the affairs of China, in a manner that would sharply affect the development of the revolution. I was to view that episode from the sidelines again in Peking.

^[*]See BN.

^[**]"International Press Correspondence, "organ of the Third, or Communist, International (Comintern), published in Moscow.